Chapter 49: Chapter 48

Tibs woke to the sounds of the town and the sun filling the room with light. There had been talk of buying fabric to cover them so he could sleep better, but he hadn’t let them spend the coins. He’d learned to sleep under all kinds of conditions while surviving his street. The room was empty, everyone about their business. Carina and Jackal hadn’t been in their bed when Tibs had stopped by in the night to change into something more suitable than his armor to move quietly into houses.

He knew where Jackal was. Any night he wasn’t here he spent with Kroseph, but he couldn’t think of any time Carina hadn’t slept in her bed while part of the team. He’d have to look for her and talk about their issues. He did his best to do as she had suggested to Jackal, about him and Kroseph, and account for their different views of the world, but she’d have to explain why letters were so important to her.

He knew they were, and he knew she had to know them. As a sorcerer and someone who came from more coins than he did, it was expected. It was her insistence on him knowing them he didn’t understand.

He relieved himself in the empty bucket, then dressed. His clothes smelled of soap and flowers. The first time it happened, he told Carina she didn’t have to, and found out Mez was the one who’d had them cleaned. He could get an armload of clothing clean for a copper at the laundry house, so he got it done. The way he’d said it told Tibs he wanted him to do it too, but he was fine with dunking them in a barrel of rainwater to clean them.

Mez wasn’t fine with that.

He got a tankard of water from the barrel outside the rooming house and brought it back to the room, where he spent time and most of his patience trying to sense and manipulate essence.

At one point, the door opened and closed fast enough he thought he’d imagined it, but he’d sensed the person walking away on the other side of the door. An earth essence Runner. One with a key to the room, so Jackal. Tibs still looked around the room to make sure nothing had been moved before getting back to his practice.

The most frustrating thing about it was that he couldn’t see any kind of progress. He still lost ‘touch’ with one the moment he tried to add the other. Alistair had talked about it as if it was easy, but now Tibs realized there might be a reason this was taught later, and not just because it was the way things were always done.

Once he had enough, he moved onto imbuing, using one of his new throwing knives to practice with. Like the sensing and manipulating exercise, it wasn’t as easy as his teacher made it seem. It was simple enough to move the essence into the knife; essence was everywhere, but it was making it stay there that proved harder.

Alistair had done something that kept all the essence from flowing out; and studying what he remembered of the feel, there had been a change to the shape of the knife’s essence too, but that part Tibs had problems with, although he’d worked out he needed to use the essence he wanted to imbue to cause the change. Alistair couldn’t have used metal essence since it wasn’t his. He could alter the shape, but he hadn’t worked out how to get it to stay in the new shape.

The door slammed shut and Tibs looked up as Mez threw himself on his bed. “I hate this place.” He yelled into his sheets.

“I think everyone does at one time or another,” Tibs said, and Mez’s head snapped up in surprise.

“I thought you’d be out.”

Tibs shrugged and showed his knife. “Training with my essence. Once it’s dark, I’ll walk the roofs for a while.” The sun was lower, but not to the point he needed a lamp. He’d woken up early today.

Mez grumbles something else as he buried his face in covers again.

“Did Jackal do something to piss you off?”

The no that came was only barely understandable. Then Mez raised his head. “Why would you think my problem’s with Jackal?”

Tibs shrugged. “He’s Jackal. He tends to piss people off.”

“It’s not him. It’s this town. I thought now that nobles are here things would change. They’d get better. That they would show the other Runners how to be better.”

Tibs stared at the man, tried to understand where he’d lived, that nobles made anything better. As far as Tibs was concerned, the only thing a noble made better was their own lives, and always at the expense of someone with fewer coins. Instead of commenting, he turned back to his knife.

“You’re also part of why I’m angry, but with you, I don’t have a right to be.”

Tibs put the blade down. “What did I do?” if he’d angered a teammate, a friend, he didn’t want to leave it going.

Mez sat on his bed and indicated the knife.

“I’m a Rogue?” Tibs guessed.

“The stuff you’re doing with it. Where you’re at in your training. I can’t sense the stuff around me like you do. Carina can, Khumdar… well, maybe he can. He can’t stop being mysterious about what a cleric can and can’t do, so who knows. You even got Jackal to do it, and I can’t do anything. I should be able to make flame arrows by now. The three other fire archers do it, so why can’t I?”

“Maybe the flame arrow isn’t your thing. Not everyone with the same essence does the same thing with them. Jackal coats himself. There’s another earth fighter who uses hers to make weapons out of it to fight with.”

“But they make what they’re doing look easy, you make it look easy.”

Tibs looked at the knife, recalled his frustration at his other exercises. “It isn’t. And you only see what I’ve gotten good at. There’s plenty I still can’t do.”

“You mean there’s plenty at level Rho, that you can’t do, ignoring the fact you shouldn’t even be able to do what you can,” Mez said in frustration.

Tibs turned in his chair and rested his arms over the back. “It bothers you that much?”

Mez shook his head, then nodded, then swore and threw his hands up. “I don’t know.” He breathed heavily. “I was raised to know there is a right way and a wrong way things are done. There are rules to tell us what they are. You act with honor, you follow the rules, that is what marks a man from a child. This place doesn’t care about the rules.”

“Harry cares about them.”

“Not enough to keep you from ‘walking the roofs’.”

“That doesn’t break the rules.”

The angry look Mez gave Tibs had him blushing in embarrassment. “You know that’s not the part that breaks the rules, Tibs.”

“I’m a Rogue, I have to train.”

“Then they should be doing the training, for free,” he added, then was silent for a few seconds. “I try to ignore it. I know you don’t do anything bad as part of your training, but I know of two Rogues who spent time in the cells because they were caught, so yeah, there is some order, but it’s flexible, and that’s not really order.”

“The place I’m from. The nobles change the rules whenever they want. My street suffered a lot if one of them wanted something, even if he stole it, and I’d get my hand cut if I tried something like that.”

Mez rested his head against the wall. “The nobles back home, they maintain order. They’re what I wanted to be, before this place. They aren’t perfect. But they are punished like the rest of us. Not less, not more. Exactly like the rest. We are all equal to the rules. I miss that.”

Tibs nodded. “I’d miss it too. Sounds like a nice place to live in. How did you end up in a cell? Before being sent here?”

Mez was quiet, staring into the distance. “I was not a man,” he finally said. “In this place, I’m afraid that I’ll never become one.”

“With the way you define it, I’ll never be one.” Tibs smiled. “Being a kid has its advantages. People underestimate me a lot.”

“You are still a child, Tibs. You should have been left free to be one.”

Tibs shook his head. “I haven’t been one for a long time. The Street doesn’t let children live. I’m not the kind of man your city would recognize, but I had to become one to survive.”

“I grant that’s true,” Mez said, “but it reflects badly on the nobles there, not you.”

Tibs snorted. “There’s a lot worse they do than make me a man.” He somberred, remembering some of the things he’d seen nobles do to boys and girls like him, when they came to his street.

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“How hard was it?” Mez asked.

“My Street?”

The man shook his head. “Learning to sense it.”

Tibs tried to remember. “It wasn’t easy, but I had to. My reserve’s so small I had to find a way to recharge it quicker. Sensing around us and learning to pull it in is what my teacher settled on. Everyone learns it eventually, but for me, it made a lot of difference. Now I’m trying to figure out how to sense it while I’m manipulating it so I can recharge my reserve as I’m using it. If I had an amulet, it wouldn’t be too important, but…”

“But you have your element now, right? Shouldn’t you have a normal reserve?”

Tibs felt his reserve. As much as he’d called it a void before, now it felt vast. It made that of the other elements seem smaller, even if he knew they hadn’t changed.

“The reserve for my essence is, but not that for water. Everyone thinks that’s my element, so I have to keep working on that to keep them from questioning me.”

“So you actually have five essences,” Mez said, as if only now learning of it.

“One and a tiny portion of four others.”

“That is so unfair,” he grumbled, “and I can’t be angry at you for that either. It isn’t like you tried to break the rules with that.”

“I don’t think there are rules with the elements,” Tibs said and tried not to chuckle at the look of dismay Mez gave him. “I think it’s more that people have agreed on what can be done and other than the sorcerers, no one tries to do anything else. My teacher said that at some point, we’re going to be taught how to think beyond what we’re initially told we can do, but I’m not seeing a lot of that here, even among the people working at the guild. It’s like they know what they have to know, and that’s enough for them.”

“Maybe it is,” Mez replied.

“But they were Runners once, weren’t they? Is what you can do enough for you?”

“I thought it was all I could do.”

“And now?” Tibs asked.

“I still can’t do anything more than what I’ve been shown, and not even that,” he answered in frustration.

“But once you’re figured that out, will it be enough?”

Mez shook his head. “Knowing what you’re able to do, no, it isn’t going to be.”

“Then why is it for those who have even more experience than we do?”

Mez thought about it, then shrugged.

Tibs put his knife with the others in the chest and put his armor on. “I’m going to head out. Walk the town before I walk the roofs. See what buildings are new.”

Mez nodded. “I’m going to work on the exercises my trainer gave me. If I can ‘get in touch with my essence’ maybe I’ll be able to move on to your stuff.”

“Just remember, essence isn’t what you think it is.”

Mez glared at him. “That really isn’t helpful without some explanation.”

Tibs wanted to explain it, but that was the secret. It was exactly what he’d said. Only the realization had to come from within. “If there was an explanation, I’d give it to you regardless of the rules. But it’s something we have to work out by ourselves. Telling you that for me, I understood it when I was able to breathe under the surface of the lake I envisioned my reserve as, isn’t going to help you, because you don’t see it the way I did. And even if you did. It wouldn’t have the same significance it had for me.”

“We all hold the answers in ourselves,” Mez grumbled. “At least you explained why. My trainer just spouted that line and left me to be confused about it.”

“He’s not your friend,” Tibs said before leaving the room.

* * * * *

The nice thing about walking the roofs was how freeing it was. The downside was that it offered no help when Tibs wanted to find one specific person, Carina. His talk with Mez had made him want to find the sorceress and talk. Explain his problems with the letters, figure out her side. Resolve the puzzle that was their differing point of views on it.

He’d ask Kroseph, they usually ate at the inn, and the server would chat. All he knew was that she was going to do some reading, which Tibs hadn’t needed help knowing. He’d gone to the book merchants, all of whom knew her, as they did every Runner who did sorcery. But while a few had seen her, she wasn’t there.

There were a few secret places where books were read, but he hadn’t figured out where those were yet. Until now, he hadn’t tried hard.

He found the one in the storage room of the Deep Tankard tavern, five of them, two Runners, a merchant’s daughter, he’d met before, and two nobles. All of whom looked terrified when Tibs slipped in through the window and among the barrels. They calmed little at his reassurances he was only looking for Carina, and wouldn’t tell on them. They hadn’t seen her, and no one would make guesses where she might be. Tibs decided it was because they were worried they’d give away the location of one of the other secret places.

The other turned out to be the cellar of an inhabited house, seven of them, all Runners, except for one, who Tibs didn’t know, but had the feel of a merchant to him with how quick he was to offer coins for Tibs’s silence. They didn’t know where she was, but the merchant’s son had seen her and she’d mentioned wanting space to practice. He’d suggested a few of the out-of-the-way locations he knew of, and Tibs had gone to each of them.

Now in the dark, he figured the best place to find his friend would be the room, but he didn’t want to talk with her while others were there, and asking her to come with him would get back to Jackal, who would make some flippant comment about them, and Tibs couldn’t deal with the man’s lack of seriousness right now. So he planned to walk the town, then the roof until he was sure they were all sleeping, change and practice his hands-on Rogue skills.

* * * * *

Then the man following Tibs forced him to change his plans.

Tibs became aware of him while walking through a less busy street. The lack of noise let him pick up the crunching of the pebbles on the dirt keeping up with him. His first thought was Bardik, but he wouldn’t hear him. He extended his sense and the ‘color’ of the person’s essence told him he was metal. There were a lot of Metal Runners, most of them fighters, but not all. Tibs knew of one archer who was Metal.

The person was reasonably good at masking their presence. One of the worse Rogues among the Runners, or someone talented at following undetected from one of the other classes. Just like how training with essence didn’t have to follow a set way. It couldn’t be possible for one of the other classes not to pick up something from their Rogue.

Tibs kept his walking to the edge of busy streets to keep his follower from thinking it would be too tough to stay undetected and move on with something, or someone else. Tibs was curious what they wanted. Maybe this was just how they practiced, the way walking the roofs and breaking into houses was how he did his. But this could be something else. Someone looking to break one of Harry’s rules. And it might not be a Runner. It could be one of the nobles who had essence.

Tibs shuddered at the idea a noble was following him. He promised himself that if it was, he would make them regret ever considering what it was they were thinking of doing to him.

He felt the essence shift around him. He couldn’t know it was his follower, but he was the only one around with essence and him as a target. So he wasn’t surprised when it focused around the porch of a house they approached; on small points within the structure. His follower was further along in his training than Tibs was. If he didn’t touch something, he couldn’t affect it. What would happen, Tibs couldn’t tell? He considered changing direction to ensure he wouldn’t be caught in it, but there were no alleys between him and the house. Just turning around might tell his pursuer Tibs was aware of what he was doing.

Instead, he waited until he was close, noting the places he could hide behind, or had space to jump out of the way. The essence intensified and Tibs stopped, looking down in a spot of light coming from a window, and knelt to study it. Keeping his actions that of someone who’d seen something interesting.

When the porch creaked and groaned, Tibs looked at it. A second later, the whole thing fell into the street. The top of the porch was a balcony where someone had stored construction tools. If he’d kept going, he’d have been killed by all that. The person ran off quickly enough all Tibs saw was a slim form. Not a fighter, he decided, which narrowed the poll of people trying to kill him a lot.

But didn’t explain why anyone in this town might want him dead.

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